I've been living in the south of France for almost six months now, in a city called Narbonne, and as a life-long Torontonian, it's been fascinating to live somewhere else for long enough to get used to it. I, my partner, and our two sons will be here until at least the end of 2008, and I'd had no intention to come home ... at least not until the Toronto Public Library chose Consolation as their inaugural "Keep Toronto Reading One Book" read. And now, in the midst of this south-of-France dream, I'm going home to Toronto. In February. Thanks TPL.
Joking aside, it's going to be interesting to see Toronto again after six months of being steeped in a place where history is not something people struggle to save. If you go digging in your backyard here and turn up a chunk of 2000-year-old Roman amphora, there's no museum in the country that's going to take it. It's yours, and you can feel free to serve olives on it or put it up on your wall, and if you're a Canadian fellow with a hankering for the past, you just might. But if you're your average local, you're tossing it on the pile with the rest of the amphorae chunks, and bits of bone and crockery and what-have-you that is a veritable layer of the soil down here.
One of the questions in Consolation is how a place, once inhabited, figures out what parts of its physical legacy is important for the future. And the illusion in a place like the one I'm in now is that they always knew what to preserve. From the perspective of a temporary inhabitant of Narbonne in 2008, it sure seems that way. And yet, when this place was still young (600 years old as opposed to nearly 2100) there was a Roman wall that had served its purposes. So they tore it down and used the stone in the church, in houses, in municipal buildings, some of which have also vanished, their stone redistributed. Imagine the uproar today if that wall were still standing and someone suggested tearing it down for use in the new community centre? And yet, in the Narbonne of A.D. 600 (when it was three times as old as Toronto is now), an already ancient Roman wall was not important enough for them to preserve.
So how do we Torontonians, as citizens of a still-new city, manage to make the right decisions for the city's future citizens? How can we know what is important? I ask these questions without knowing the answers, and at the same time, I ask them as a citizen who has felt the pain of loss, looking around the place I live in, as parts of our city's heritage are eroded to serve the needs of the immediate present. At least the church they built here in Narbonne using some of the stone from that Roman wall is still standing 1500 years later! A building like that was made to serve permanence, but I have to wonder, gazing on some of the development in our city, what gods those buildings will serve. Is a sense of place being created in Toronto for those who will come after us?
I'm absolutely delighted to be a part of the Toronto Public Library's Keep Toronto Reading program for 2008. If the week of February 4, when I'll be in town to do events (see my schedule here), is anything like the LongPen launch we had last week while I was still in France, it's going to be a blast.
I can't promise the mayor will be at everything (although, gosh, he should be), or that I'll be signing books on a computer tablet from 4000 miles away, but I'm pretty sure the company will be good. I hope you'll all welcome home a wandering son of the city and that we'll talk about Toronto's past and future, as well as its stories. And of course I hope it snows 100 centimetres while I'm there, because it's the least I deserve for the life I'm leading now (which, if you're curious, you can read about here ...)
